The first 20-minute run on your own is the most depressing. Panic sets in as the seconds seem to take their sweet freakin’ time skipping from single digits to 10, to 29 to 45 and so on until they begrudg..-ing…-ly… tick… over… into the first minute. By 2.21 minutes into it, I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. By 3.01 my breathing was all over the place, and by 4.10 I was thinking this was a very bad idea, with only body-breaking consequences. Oh well, only 15.50 minutes to go!
My neurosis knew no bounds; Jogging is bad for you isn’t it? Running on concrete is bad for the knees, and I was told that urban legend (which must be true) about jogging giving you wrinkles as your cheeks swing up and down. Was I leaning too far forward? I am sure that crack in my left ankle can’t be good in the long term. Am I supposed to sweat this much after 5 minutes? My leggings are slipping down, I am about to expose my Snoopy pants to the inhabitants of Leonard Square! I bet it isn’t human blood that courses through Jessica Ennis’s veins, but Superman's! That woman staring at me must think the same as I do when I gawk at an obvious hapless first time runners tentatively paving a path through a congested pavement… etc etc…
The agony, oh the agony!
At the first sign of a stitch, I stopped. Didn’t want to kill myself on the first run (though I was still under 13 minutes into it)...! But then walking from one lamppost to the next lamppost to the next lamppost, it was hard to find the motivation to get back into it, so to speak. Anyway, isn’t jumping from Neutral to 5th gear in a car really bad for the engine? Must be the same for humans! And no water so no fuel?
I only discovered by 18.56 the importance of a good thumping track to drown these thoughts and voices out of your head. That is the art of running – not so much the mechanics you need to focus on (limbs don’t have brains of their own fortunately!), but keeping you’re your mind clear, and pretending you aren’t running at all, but… like… sharing a mic with Mick Jagger singing Gimme Shelter, for example.
But four seconds later, 19 minutes out of 20, I patted myself on the back for a job well done and allowed myself to walk the rest of the half block home. Once back and swigging three cups on water, one after the other, I figured out that out of the 20 minutes, I only ran maximum 12 minutes ergo no need to stretch my ankles and cool down surely…
I didn't, and oh what a rookie error that was….
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